skin. Not much she can do about her face.
'Still cold?' Howard takes another step and stops. He slips his right hand into the pocket of his jeans and comes out with a leather sheath that has a bone handle protruding from it. Rose hears the unsnapping of the little strap over the handle as loudly as she would a shot. Howard's looking at her as though she's transparent, as though he can see the bench beneath her, the edge of the boat behind her.
Shoes on top, Rose thinks.
With the same relaxed, unfocused gaze, Howard pulls out the knife.
Rose yanks her feet up, lifts them as high and as quickly as she can, pushes up with her hands against the bench, and rolls backward over the edge of the boat. Just before she hits, she sees, upside down, the golden glare of the squid boats in the far distance. Then she's in the water.
Her clothes grab at her, the jacket ballooning out, and she forces herself to remain under long enough to do the bottom two snaps. It's pink, it'll show if he shines a light down, but her long hair is black and it's billowing around her. The water feels very warm after the windy rain.
She forces herself down, pulling herself through the blackness until her shoulder touches the boat. She knows she's invisible here; the outward curvature of the hull makes it impossible for anyone on board to look down at the point at which the boat enters the water. She turns so the hull is against her back, trying to present the narrowest possible silhouette, and allows herself to float up until her head breaks free of the water. With her mouth wide open, she grabs some deep breaths while she listens to Howard banging around on the boat, throwing things and screaming either meaningless sounds or a marathon of swearwords she doesn't know. A moment later a beam hits the water two or three meters to her left and a good four or five meters away from the boat.
Not the spotlight. He's got a flashlight.
'Rose!' he calls. 'Rose!' He plays the light over the water. 'Come on. It's dangerous down there.'
The light is moving slowly now, coming nearer, and again Howard says, drawing it out, 'Rosieeeeee!' The light stops, and Rose's heart stops with it. Clearly silhouetted at her eye level, glistening in the beam, are the curved tops of several sea wasps. They're only a meter or two away. They hold the light, glowing as though from within.
'Look at those,' Howard says in that same singsong voice. 'You don't want to be in there. Lots of bad things down there. Underneath you, next to you, behind you. Not a place for a pretty girl.' The boat rocks against her back as the light disappears. Now she can't see the sea wasps, and panic uncurls in her chest. She edges right, toward the front of the boat, then stops. For all she knows, there are a dozen of them right there. Frozen in place, she hears a splash from the other side of the boat.
Howard calls out, 'That's the rope. Come on, get over here. You can pull yourself up. The rope's got knots in it. You can climb it like a ladder.' The light stretches out over her head again, twitching left and right and left again over the water, pure, jittery impatience. 'Come on, Rose. I'm sorry. You're right, I shouldn't have been drinking. Listen, I'm throwing the bottle overboard.' Something flashes through the beam of light, and she hears a splash. It sends ripples toward her, probably bringing the sea wasps closer. 'Please just get to the rope and come up. I'll help you.' The light freezes at a point six or seven meters from the boat, and she can feel and hear Howard moving closer to the edge above her for a better look at whatever it is. After a moment he says, 'Fuck,' and the beam begins to move again.
For a minute or two, she tries to remain motionless as the sea lifts and lowers her. She peers into the darkness for the rounded shapes of the sea wasps. The boat rocks upward, which means Howard is back on the other side, probably playing the light in the direction of the rocks. He's swearing over and over in a low voice, like someone who doesn't know he's doing it out loud. Then she can hear his shoes on the deck, going past her toward the front of the boat-the wheel, she thinks-and for a moment everything is quiet. Then Howard says, 'Hello?' There's a pause. 'Yeah, got a problem here. How far away are you?' He waits. 'How did that happen? Shit, you're no good to me. Okay, okay. See you when I see you. And leave your phone open, so I don't have to fuck around dialing you.'
Rose knows she has to move. She can't stay where she is, but she can't think of anyplace safer. The water, which felt so warm when she entered it, now seems much cooler, seems to be leaching the heat from her body. And she's uncomfortably aware of the dark depths beneath her, and of the sea wasps, invisible for now, floating level with her face or just beneath the surface.
And then Howard calls, 'Gotcha!' and the light shines right down the side of the boat, and Howard's face dangles down, pale in the reflection of the flashlight. He's managed to anchor his feet somehow so he can hang over the side, but the light is hitting nothing. It's focused straight down, near the motor, but Rose knows he can turn it toward her at any second, and she grabs a breath and ducks under.
If the sea wasps are like the jellyfish she dodged in Pattaya, she thinks, they usually stay on the surface or in the meter or so just below it. She forces herself down into the darkness, fighting against her buoyancy, until she can't hold her breath anymore, and she stops her stroke and lets her body right itself to the vertical again. Rising, she bends her head forward at the sharpest possible angle as her shoulders slide up the curvature of the boat, hoping that her hair will protect her if she's coming up beneath a sea wasp. When she breaks the surface, she lifts her head and grabs the biggest breath of her life, mouth wide open to make it as quiet as possible. Howard is banging around on the other side, and then she hears him go forward, probably to climb up near the spotlight and look down from the prow.
She wants to get to the stern. She pictures the stretch of black water between her and it, and suddenly she has a strategy. She pulls her hand back into the sleeve of her jacket so no skin is exposed, extends her right arm along the side of the boat, and then sweeps it stiffly away, elbow straight, toward the bright pinpoint of the squid boats. She's careful to stop when her arm is straight in front of her, terrified of sweeping a cluster of jellyfish into her face. Only when she's finished the maneuver does she ease herself right, almost as far as her arm had reached, and repeat the action.
The fourth time her arm encounters resistance, as though the water has suddenly thickened, and then she feels the dead, soft weight against her inner arm, just below the elbow. Her gasp is reflexive and, to her, deafening. She clamps her teeth together and keeps the arm moving, sweeping the cold, heavy, yielding mass aside. Then she pulls her arm down and holds her breath, shuddering violently and listening. It isn't until she hears Howard still lumbering around on the prow, not rushing toward the sound she'd made, that she moves into the space she's just cleared with her arm.
She's dizzy with fear, but there's a hard little bit of knowledge gleaming inside her: The sea wasps can't sting her through her clothes.
With three more swipes of her arm-finding nothing more floating in the water-she's at the corner, with her back still to the boat. The rain, which had lightened, begins to come down harder again, making the sea around her hiss as the drops strike. For several minutes, Howard remains relatively still, except for a couple of changes in weight, shifting from foot to foot, moving a few feet to one side or the other.
He grunts.
Grunting? Why? Lifting something? Lifting what? What's so heavy? And then she hears a sharp snap, and she knows what it is. It's the cuff of the rubber wet suit. It's not for the cold, he'd said. It's for something else. A second later there's a loud splash as he strikes the sea's surface on the other side of the boat.
The only direction that makes sense is the one she's most afraid to take: outward, away from the boat, away from the rocks, toward the fiery glow of the squid boats, maybe three or four kilometers away. She's sure he'll circle the boat first and then maybe swim toward the rocks to see whether she's clinging to the far side of one of them.
She can't endure the thought of swimming facedown, eyes and mouth open to the jellyfish coming out of the darkness, and she can't stay underwater for more than a few yards at a time. So she rolls onto her back and pulls herself away from the boat, looking up at the sky, the rain pelting her face, hoping once again that her thick, heavy hair and the jacket with its turned-up collar will protect her head and neck if she swims into anything. The rain is colder than the seawater, and she opens her mouth, letting it land sweet and cool on her tongue, closing her eyes against it and feeling it tap gently against her eyelids. She counts her heartbeats, since she has no other way to measure time.
When her heart has beaten two hundred times, she stops swimming and lets her feet dangle down into the cooler water below. Then she pulls some of her hair forward, to cover her face, which she knows will look pale above the water. She clears just enough hair from her eyes to see.
